The White House has just released the draft of a national strategy for protecting identities online.  The plan calls for individuals to voluntarily obtain a secure credential - a smart identity card or something similar - from a number of public and private sector providers. This credential would then be used for online authentication when banking, accessing electronic health records, making online purchases, and other transactions.

Howard Schmidt, the cybersecurity coordinator and special assistant to the president, talked about the plan in the White House blog.  “No longer should individuals have to remember an ever-expanding and potentially insecure list of usernames and passwords to log into various online services,” he said.

A NSTIC website has been set up to receive comments, and already, experts are calling for use of one-time passcode and strong authentication as part of the plan.  John Pescatore, vice president and research fellow at Gartner, speaking to SCMagazine, said "The real issue why there's successful cybercrime is because we are still using reusable passwords (as opposed to one-time passwords or other strong authentication methods), and that's the only choice people have. If you really want to address cybercrime and identity theft, you address what the government can do to minimize the use of reusable passwords versus putting together a complicated framework which will rely on passwords all over again.”